Monthly Archives: October 2012

Three years ago our son gave us some wood plugs impregnated with oyster mushroom spores. We drilled some fairly fresh ash and field maple logs and inserted the plugs – and nothing happened. Now one of the logs has sprouted an oyster mushroom – but not enough to eat. Coincidently at the same time some natural oyster mushrooms appeared on an ash tree.

Walking in the wood yesterday I found several fungi, here are two of them. Both of these are edible (with care) – the Wood Blewit (Clitocybe nuda) which is supposed to be very good and (probably) Common Puff Ball (Lycoperdon Perlatum) which is edible but not with alcohol. Always ensure you can identify fungi before eating them, and most need to be cooked.

Deer, both fallow and roe, come out of the wood to eat our garden plants and fruit trees! Last night two roe deer came to do just that. In the picture you can see one grazing the lawn and one eating a fruit tree (top right hand corner of image).

We cut a Sallow (Salix cinerea) as a high coppice (or low pollard) stop the rabbits eating all the new growth. However it appears just an extra few inches discouraged the fallow deer from eating the shoots on one of the stems. We now have a benchmark for the future.